For the first time ever, thanks to the Latin Mass Society, we now have an accurate statistical picture of Catholic faith and life in this country both prior to, and following the Second Vatican Council.
Dr Joseph Shaw, Chairman of the LMS, working with the Rev Stephen Morgan and a team from the diocese of Portsmouth, has amassed the figures for Catholic Ordinations, Baptisms, Conversions and Marriages in England and Wales dating from the 1860s onwards.
The results (see below) point to a collapse in Catholic faith and life in this country during the late 1960s and the 1970s; a collapse which has not been reversed in the decades since. This is will not surprise anyone reading this blog. The importance of having statistics such as these is, in large part, to highlight the tragic decline in the Catholic Church in this country following Vatican II, a fact that cannot be denied or covered up with false optimism or propaganda.
This important research is covered on Rorate Caeli, the LMS Chairman's Blog, and in this week's Catholic Herald.
Newly
released statistics show the decline of the Catholic Church in England and
Wales in 1960s and 1970s.
Research
by the Latin Mass Society has demonstrated the striking decline of a range of
statistical indications of the health of the Catholic Church in England and
Wales in the 1960s and 1970s.
To
our knowledge this data has never been made available in collated form before:
the number of ordinations year by year since 1860, the number of priests since
1890, and baptisms, marriages, and receptions, and estimates of the Catholic
population, since 1913.
Among
the findings are:
Marriages:
The
number of marriages collapsed by a third between 1968 and 1978 (from 47,417 to
31,534), and has continued a rapid decline since then, now standing at less
than 10,000 a year, a quarter of the 1968 level in absolute terms, and even
less in relation to the estimated Catholic population (from 12 per thousand in
1968) to 2½ per thousand in 2010).
Conversions fell off a cliff in the
1960s. From a peak of 15,794 in 1959, it fell to 5,117 in 1972; in relation the
Catholic population, it fell by more than 70% between those two years. It has
not recovered.
Baptisms halved between 1964 and
1977 (137,673 in 1964 to 68,351 in 1977), and are even lower today (oscillating
around the 60,000 mark). This is not just the effect of the end of the ‘baby boom’:
considered in relation to total live births for England and Wales (using data
from the Office for National Statistics), the first half of the 20th
century saw steady growth, with Catholic baptisms peaking at nearly 16% of all
live births in 1963. This was followed by a decline of a third between the mid
1960s and the mid 1970s. A more gentle decline has continued to the present:
today fewer than 10% of babies born alive in England and Wales are being
baptised in the Catholic Church.
Ordinations
fell by
more than 56% between 1965 and 1977 (from 233 to 101), and the decline has continued.
Even on the more optimistic figures supplied by the National Office of
Vocations (compared to the Catholic Directory) for the current year, showing an
increase on recent years, numbers are at scarcely 30% of their 1964 level.
(Counting only ordinations to the diocesan clergy, there were 134 in 1964; the
NOV predicts 41 this year.)
Dr
Joseph Shaw, the Chairman of the Latin Mass Society, who led the research,
comments:
‘Anyone
with an interest in the future of the Catholic Church in England and Wales will
find these figures illuminating. They show unambiguously that something went
seriously wrong in the Church in England and Wales in the 1960s and 1970s.
Catholics ceased quite
suddenly to see the value of getting married, having large families, and having
their children baptised. Non-Catholics no longer perceived the Church as the
ark of salvation, and ceased to seek admission. Young men no longer offered themselves
for the priesthood in the same numbers as before.
‘It
is not fanciful to connect this catastrophe to the wrenching changes which were
taking place in the Church at that time, when the Second Vatican Council was
being prepared, discussed, and, often erronesouly, applied. As Pope Benedict
wrote in the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum (2007):
in many places celebrations were not faithful to
the prescriptions of the new Missal, but the latter actually was understood as
authorizing or even requiring creativity, which frequently led to deformations
of the liturgy which were hard to bear. I am speaking from experience, since I
too lived through that period with all its hopes and its confusion. And I have
seen how arbitrary deformations of the liturgy caused deep pain to individuals
totally rooted in the faith of the Church.
‘The
theological and liturgical fashions of that era were invariably justified by
the hope of positive pastoral results, and these results manifestly failed to
materialise.
‘The
effect of dissent from the Church’s teaching is particularly manifest in
relation to contraception, which has had a direct consequence on the Catholic
birth rate, as reflected in the number of baptisms, compared to the national
birth rate.
‘The
Church in England and Wales today has fewer than half the ordinations each year
than it had in the 1860s, but more than double the number of priests. A large proportion of
those priests, however, will die or have to stop work over the next decade. In
this respect we are still living on our capital, and this capital is about to
run out.
‘The
Extraordinary Form has not lost its power to attract young men to the
priesthood, and the communities which have grown up around it today provide
disproportionate numbers of vocations, marriages, and baptisms. Thirteen young men from
England and Wales are currently studying for the priesthood in the different
religious orders committed to the Extraordinary Form; three more should join
them in September; these are numbers which many dioceses would envy.
‘We
believe that the Extraordinary Form (the Traditional Mass) has an important
role to play in resolving the crisis in the Church.’
Notes
on the statistics.
Unless
otherwise indicated, the statistics are taken from the Catholic Directory. Statistics for
ordinations can be recovered only by manually counting the lists of men
ordained each year; some of this work was done by the Rev. Stephen Morgan and a
team at the Diocese of Portsmouth. The Latin Mass Society has filled in the
gaps in Rev. Morgan’s figures and extended the range of dates covered in both
directions. In addition, the LMS has added the total number of clergy, and the
numbers given in the Directory’s ‘Recapitulation of Statistics’ since 1913,
which include Baptisms, Marriages, Adult Conversions (renamed ‘Receptions’ in
1976), and estimates of the Catholic population.
We
are very grateful to the Rev. Stephen Morgan for letting us use the fruits of
his research, to the Fathers of the London Oratory for giving us access to
their library, and to a number of Latin Mass Society volunteers for their time.
The full press release on the LMS website:
A downloadable spreadsheet showing all the figures with 13 graphs:
JPEGs of all the graphs on a Flickr set:
Free use of all the above, with attribution to the LMS.
For
further information contact either: Mike Lord, General Manager, on 020 7404
7284 or michael@lms.org.uk
